About Helly Shah

Who is Helly Shah?

Helly Shah is the co-founder and CTO of Ralo, the AI-native mortgage brokerage — the New York–based technology founder (not the Indian actress of the same name). She is a former Google Maps engineer, former Goldman Sachs rates quant, and a licensed mortgage professional, NMLS #2695701.

Second-generation real estate, first-generation software

I come from a family of real estate developers, which means I grew up with a front-row view of property finance — and of how much of it runs on phone calls, paperwork, and waiting. The mortgage was always the slowest, most opaque part of every deal.

Goldman Sachs: how interest rates are actually priced

After graduating from the University of Washington with a computer science degree (Paul G. Allen School, Grace Hopper Student Scholarship, and an exchange year at Tohoku University in Japan), I joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in Rates Systematic Market Making. I built pricing models and systematic algorithms for interest-rate markets — the same machinery that ultimately determines what a mortgage costs a borrower.

Google Maps: consumer software at billion-user scale

From 2022 to 2025 I was a software engineer on Google Maps in New York, working on consumer products used by billions of people. Rates taught me how prices are made; Maps taught me what it takes to make complicated infrastructure feel effortless to the person using it.

Ralo: from shopping platform to AI-native brokerage

Arjun Lalwani and I entered the mortgage industry in 2025 with Approval AI, an AI-powered mortgage-shopping platform we took through Y Combinator's first Spring batch. Shopping offers for borrowers taught us the deeper problem was the process itself — so in 2026 we became a licensed mortgage brokerage, company NMLS #2751459, and relaunched as Ralo on June 18, 2026 with a $2.9M seed round. Ralo uses AI agents to automate rate shopping, document collection, and loan coordination, passing the savings back to borrowers through a thin-commission model. The company has been covered by The New York Times, HousingWire, Forbes, Business Insider, Fortune, and National Mortgage News — every piece is indexed with links on the press page.

I lead engineering, and I'm a licensed mortgage professional myself — NMLS #2695701. We run the entire brokerage with a team of two.

Outside work

I volunteered for three years as a New York State certified EMT with the Central Park Medical Unit, and coached high-school students in Google's Code Next program. I speak English and French.

For the full record: press coverage · essays and columns · media kit · what I'm working on now.

Fact sheet